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Monday, December 19, 2016

Homeschooling

Now that we are towards the end of pregnancy of offspring #2, I'm realizing that I'm probably going to wish that I kept a record of the homeschooling stuff that I did with Madeleine a little better. Instagram gets a lot of it, and I enjoy using mostly for tracking my day to day things, but typing things out on a computer is much easier than trying to do it on the ipad. On top of that, even though I haven't blogged a lot, Matt and I still refer back to here regularly to see what we did with Madeleine as a tinier human. I'm guessing we'll keep that up for the long run, so it's worth putting more things on here.

My basic homeschooling philosophy is to expose Madeleine to things and hope she learns something in the meanwhile. We have very low expectations for her. Pretty much we expect her to try it, and let us know what she thinks. We don't do almost any letters or numbers in our home. Most things are units based on what is going on in our lives, or something that Matt and I are interested in that we think Madeleine might like too. The wonderful thing about 3 is that they are curious about everything, so it's really hard to have something flop. I don't think anything has yet to be honest, even with the kids I babysit everyday. As long as I present it as something that I'm interested in, they are usually pretty cool with it.

What we've done so far...
Age 0-1: Survive as parents
Age 1-2: Learn how to not kill self
Age 2-3: Emotions, colors, and started with foods

Emotions

Happy

Angry

Sad

Hurt

Colors

Foods

Berries

Brussel Sprouts

Honey

Eggs

Bread

Asparagus

Apples

Yogurt

Where meat comes from

Other random things

Introduced butter knife

Laundry

Age 3-4: We focused mostly on food, but we put other things in too.

Food units

Meatballs

Spaghetti

Lettuce

Lavender

Ice cream

Strawberries

Blackberries

Tomatoes

Pears

Peaches

Apples

Bread

Salad

Pickles

Cucumbers

Soup

Cookies

Radishes

Scallops

Honey

Emotions (kind of)

Disappointed

Mean

How being tired effects how we feel

Excited

Patience

Calming routines

How our words can effect others (like calling someone fat or saying you don't want to play with someone)

Bad choices v good choices

Frustration

Other stuff

How babies are made

How families are connected

Blood

Being nice to the Earth

Rosa Parks

Gardening

Butterfllies

Composting

Microbes

Seasons (This one is on going. All other units revolve around the seasons for the most part)

What kind of music we like

Making grocery list and sticking to them

Quilting

Forests

Geography

The Nutcracker

Social Scripts

How to act in a library

How to order food

How to pay for food

How to ask others for help

How to say and use the phrase "excuse me"

The general outline for a unit is lots of books plus an activity a day.

For food, we go to the farmer's market and she gets to pick out and pay for the food that we are going to do. Then I already have a list of books on hold at the library. We then generally make 2-3 recipes with said food. The idea behind it is that she tries new foods and that she learns that she can "not like how something is cooked" but she can still like the food. Ex. She hates pickled onions but loves onions in salsa.

The rest are pretty similar with the exception of scripts, since Matt and I rehearse with her, practice, and then make her do it. After we do a debriefing too. :D Right now we are working on speaking up when ordering at somewhere loud and giving people a bit more space when waiting in line. We don't wait in line near her. We usually are 20+ feet away because otherwise we find that people try to yell across the restaurant to talk to us instead of talking to her. For things that more complicated than Costco ("I'd like a hot dog, please."), I sometimes send her with a piece of paper, but for the most part she can do it. I also send her with almost if not exact change, so the money part isn't an issue.

And that's pretty much it. :) I'm going to hopefully start putting up the activities and books we are reading. Right now, I have the current unit on pinterest and as we do the pins, I delete them. But this way, hopefully I can keep everything together for future reference.

2 comments:

You are doing such a great job! One of all of my kiddos favorites was to pick different countries every 2 weeks. We would have a couple of meals from said country. The kids would research the country, find the flag, find it on the world map and tell us about what they discovered. They still talk about that. We did it for years.